Israeli Public Opinion Polls:
Opinion Poll on Importance
of the Jordan Valley

(Updated May 2006)

A survey conducted and commissioned
by Mina Tzemah of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs
Defensibile Borders Project in 2005 suggested that
Israelis believed that disengagement from Gaza was
a good decision for Israel, but less than one in
five participants support another unilateral
withdrawal and oppose returning strategically important areas
to the Palestinians. Of the 500 respondents of the
survey, an overwhelming majority of almost 80 percent
preferred keeping strategic territory as part of Israel,
such as the Jordan
Valley, in any peace agreement reached
with the Palestinians. The Jordan Valley was viewed
by the participants as a buffer zone between Israel
and Jordan.

Nearly all of the participants (93
percent) said, “in the context of a peace agreement,
Israel must not give the Palestinians the territories
that topographically dominate Ben-Gurion
airport.”

However, when asked about the importance
of retaining control of the Temple
Mount, the numbers
were strikingly different. Illustrating a divide in
Israeli society, 53 percent to 47 percent of those
participating said that as part of a peace deal with
the Palestinians, they would hand over the Temple Mount
to an international body, as long as the Western
Wall remained in Israeli control.

In another poll conducted in December
2005, 49 percent of Israelis
said they would support a deal in which Jerusalem’s
Arab neighborhoods would be given to the Palestinian
Authority under the same conditions of Israeli maintaining
control of the Western Wall, while 49 percent would
oppose such a deal.